Goodbye, Google Docs. We're building the editor for Content Marketers.

_{Day 118/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

Messy Monday time and—spoiler—things are deliciously messy.

I’ve spent the last seven days poking, prodding, and occasionally round-house-kicking Google Docs in the shins.

Why?

Because it’s great for group essays and awful for long-form content marketing.

I said as much last Monday.
Since then, my inbox has been a confessional booth for writers traumatised by:

• 42 fonts that all look the same

• Copy-pasting into WordPress and watching the formatting explode like confetti

• Toolbars longer than War and Peace

That pain is the brief. Penfriend’s new editor is the antidote.

GOODBYE, GOOGLE DOCS

I’m not building a Swiss Army Knife.
I’m building one sharp knife.

Clean interface.
Markdown-ish shortcuts.
Zero hidden gremlins when you export.

I’ve been dog-fooding the super-early build all week. It’s still wearing stabilisers, but I already prefer it to Docs. The canvas feels spacious. The toolbar shows up only when invited—like a well-trained dog, not a caffeinated meerkat.

CTRL-ALT-DEL ON CLUTTER

Here’s the north star:

So the editor:

• Surfaces SEO gaps before you’ve written 2,000 aimless words

• Flags lifeless sentences and begs for a quick CPR rewrite

• Tracks every tweak you make, then tells you whether the draft’s getting warmer or colder

Think Grammarly meets Notion meets that brutally honest friend who won’t let you leave the house in bad shoes.

Writing for tomorrow’s Google.

Saturday’s rabbit hole: “AI Mode” SERPs.
Translation: Google’s LLM blurbs that chew up your article and spit out an answer before anyone clicks your link.

Fun.

So we hacked together a prototype that:

1. Scans AI-Mode results for a keyword

2. Maps which angles the bots already cover

3. Spits out the white space - so your piece targets what the robots missed

4. Measures your Vibe Score (viewpoint • Individual • Beat • Evidence) as you write

The dream: talk to Penfriend like you’d brief an eager intern. It interviews you, pinches your hard-won stories, shapes an outline built for LLM digestion, and nudges you until the whole thing feels undeniably you.

WHAT’S NEXT

• Private alpha slots open this week (reply with “Editor!” if you want in).

• Vibe Score gets its first public beating on Wednesday—bring a helmet.

• I’ll keep wrestling with export workflows until they’re boringly seamless.

Messy? Absolutely.
Moving? Faster than Docs updates, anyway.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "Draft Punk" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. Google docs is for essays. Penfriend is for content marketers.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.